Craftwork: why woodwork is wooing London's super-rich

Law also teaches boat-building and meets a lot of high-achievers in their late 30s wanting to escape. There are TV execs, engineers and younger people doing it instead of university.

The effects of the financial crisis are still being felt, with graduates 40 per cent less likely to choose a career in banking than they were before 2008.

Messums runs regular courses in a 13th-century wooden barn, where execs decompress by making boats, spoons and chairs. At the moment they are also getting inspiration from pieces by Thomas Heatherwick at the gallery’s wood exhibition.

Unless you are Heatherwick, woodwork is rather less well paid than city jobs, but nevertheless still in demand. There’s a skills shortage, so craftsmen are hot property. Milner says: “Screen culture is all well and good but it is not going to provide all young people with jobs necessarily. Woodwork isdemocratic, anyone can take it up.” Even a jaded City veteran.

There are women woodworkers, too, but Milner says it has particular appeal formen. “Women have a gearchange built into their life when they have children. Men don’t. They have to find a way to survive without burning out.”

For Hope it was a chance to go back to something he’d enjoyed at school but “not had a chance to pursue because I was pulled into looking for a job that would make money.

Eventually I had to leave it because I was in the grips of a smouldering midlife crisis.”

Hope would like to think his career change will change the way his sons think of jobs. “What’s incredibly important is that they’ve seen the happiness working with wood has brought me. Success should not be measured by material wealth.”

Others are actually buying woods. Milner says: “Bankers are buying up farms and planting trees. These bankers may be powerful in the financial world but they don’t know about coppicing, for instance, or how to grow trees. They are turning into the new custodians of the countryside, and enjoying it.”

Some are holiday woodworkers, like Merrick Howes, a hedge-fund manager who flies over from Sydney to take part in Messums’ workshops.

Milner explains: “These people are doers. It wouldn’t be a holiday for them just sitting on a beach — they are action men who need to keep busy, and so making things is the perfect mindful activity.” Hope sums it up:

“Working with wood gives a new sense of great satisfaction.”

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